5 ms·

> self-described “vegan Sith” ideology Had it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort. “We are just like

by rdtsc 2y ago

> self-described “vegan Sith” ideology Had it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort. “We are just like Darth Maul, but we like salads and drink soy milk instead of regular milk… and then kill people while dressed in tactical black outfits”? What is even going on? Real life now sounds like some kinda of a broken LLM hallucination.

mnky9800n 2y ago
people can and do have mental illness. it doesn't absolve them from knowing right from wrong however.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  Since it’s a group so wonder if a group mental illness would make sense. I guess it could work for the court “look how out of touch with reality my client is, sith vegans, clearly they didn’t know what they were doing!”
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    I’m sure the court juge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name. Understanding their motivations for the murders, understanding their motivation to call themselves vegan (perhaps it’s a joke for them too, perhaps they’re really vegan) and their motivation to call themselves sith (I would bet for fun joke but it may be branding : and army of determined warriors, or mental illness if their really believe to be sith - yes human brain can to that). It’s very easy to find apparent incoherences in humans behavior by selectively picking out and not searching the motivations. This is the base attack for teenagers bullying book.
    - rdtsc 2y ago
      > I’m sure the court judge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name Oh sure, and the jury. One can do both - mock murderers and their ridiculous ideology and study it seriously to, perhaps, prevent others from taking the same path. One doesn't preclude the other, though. To a certain degree I think these group enjoy being taken seriously, being in the news, fawned over, their writings analyzed by people going over their "deep" and "insightful" ideas. So that direction could be playing into their hands to a certain extent. For now, I'll go the "ridicule" path, I think.
      - aziaziazi 2y ago
        Fair points! Both that taking them seriously is probably the direction they aim, and that we shouldn’t forget to have fun and laugh!
  - uxp100 2y ago
    It was very cult like with Ziz cutting off members from their friends and the internet. And writing long complicated essays that didn’t make sense if you weren’t in the group.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  > it doesn't absolve them from knowing right from wrong however Certain mental conditions absolutely do, in a legal sense. Some conditions onset from brain injury and tumors, some to drug exposure, some are genetic, etc. For those unfortunate few who are afflicted, the most humane outcome is to intervene to keep them away from harming themselves and others, though often they are left unattended to by overstretched mental health services.
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    I totally agree with that, meanwhile I think mnky meant that illness doesn’t necessarily remove all your judgement. You can have totally coherent thinking on a field while being incapable to reason on another. Easy exemple : Math and Empathy, where schizophrenic may excel in the former while lacking the later. Someone affected by trisomy 21 have more chances to get the opposite. <- generalization for illustration purpose, those affections are complex and schizophrenia is a spectrum anyway. Even for non-Ill-defined, PTS and other trauma or just learnings- can do that to anyone and age doesn’t help to escape the reasoning-habits. Wise are those that can stay free from mental cages.
  - mnky9800n 2y ago
    Paranoid delusions related to obsessive compulsive disorders or personality disorders stemming from post traumatic stress rarely seem to qualify insanity pleas except in episodes of law and order even though they can motivate highly irrational and self destructive behaviour.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    Does it really count if the difference is "be removed from society for a while by being sent to prison" vs "be removed from society indefinitely by being sent to inpatient lockup"?
- pjc50 2y ago
  We really need a phrase for "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things". It's a very common component in mass shootings.
  - incrudible 2y ago
    The things they believe are quite possibly internally consistent and not insane at all, just so far outside the overton window of an ordinary person so as to sound insane. Rather, they are the fringes of the fringes of political ideology and in my view the prime cause of falling prey to these is social alienation.
  - MrLeap 2y ago
    > "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things" I have met a lot of people in my life who fit this criteria. Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter. Saying we need a phrase to label people like this in order to _stop mass killings_ sounds crazy to me. If you really had the option to explore the psyche of everyone to the depth necessary to check for "believes insane things" if we could even agree on what that means, I wouldn't be surprised if the test came back positive on 40-70% of the population. A strict enough test and I think we could get that number to 100%. Isn't it a meme at this point how people win the nobel prize in one field, and then say some nutty nonsense about a completely different field? The human species is rational, insane, brilliant, stupid, compassionate and vicious, ugly and beautiful all at once. All of us. More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
    - vkou 2y ago
      > Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter. No, but with a few friends getting together, cheering them along, and feeding into their collective insanity, they could very easily get together and do something serious. Most of the insurrectionists (the people who invaded Congress, not the people who went home after attending the rally) in Jan 6th can be described as such. That network of 'friends' is critical for actually motivating them to get off their ass and act on their beliefs. > More compassion for self and others would be my preference. The problem is that it's much easier to violently destroy, than it is to create, and the damage that a group of angry people who believe an utterly insane thing is disproportionate.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Neonlicht 2y ago
[flagged]
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  define insane here. I think modern social acceptability hinges more on the degree to which personal beliefs infringe on others, at least in the west. If someone refuses to personally eat pasta because they believe in the great spaghetti monster, they can knock themselves out for all I care.
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    To the extent that your neighbors believe in false or unprovable things that don’t exist in our tangible reality, that should concern you. This can absolutely lead to horrifying violence, and has repeatedly done so in the past. The good thing about most major organized religions is that they’ve developed (some) guardrails against murdering the non-believers based on the theory that some intangible being requires this of them.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      All first principles are unprovable. Theism does not have a monopoly on violence, so I don't see why I should be more concerned about it then anything else.
      - matthewdgreen 2y ago
        Because you can't reason with someone who doesn't employ reason. That doesn't mean they won't kill you - it just shuts down one avenue by which you might talk them out of it.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        But religious people can be reasonable and atheist can be unreasonable.
tolerance 2y ago
Look up Joshua Citarella’s coverage of the ideological milieus that Generation Z cultivated during COVID on platforms like Discord. And then check out the term “metairony” or “postirony” and this story make more sense…at least as much sense as the absurdity of it all will allow you to make of it.
- teachrdan 2y ago
  We seem to live in a post-ironic moment. Look no further than the Boogaloo Boys. They want to start a second American civil war and are named after the 1984 movie "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo". It would be a joke except they've engaged in violent attacks up to and including murder in the service of trying to start that aforementioned civil war. Are they serious or a joke? I think their embrace of a ridiculous name makes them almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term. It's comparable to how the Nazi "goose step" march was terrifying precisely because it was so awkward and unnatural. It's like, if these guys are capable of doing this with a straight face, what else are they capable of? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Jokingly referring to something as "<subject_goes_here> 2: Electric Boogaloo" was a very common turn of phrase on certain parts of the internet in the early-mid 2010s. It sounds like a joke because it grew out of a joke.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    >almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term. I think another way to look at it is willful nonconformance and rejection of mainstream values (and judgement). Not unlike gutter punks dressing the way they did. I think counter culture has a long history of this, from men wearing their hair long to people dressing up as literal clowns.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  This post came to mind for me https://moonmetropolis.substack.com/p/antioch-the-first-foodist-mass-shooting https://moonmetropolis.substack.com/p/antioch-the-first-food...
joe_the_user 2y ago
"Vegan Sith"? For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.
- zozbot234 2y ago
  A far more likely possibility is that their ideology is actually centered around "Sith who happen to originate from Vega (a.k.a. α Lyrae)", not "Sith who abstain from animal products". (A residual possibility is "Sith from Las Vegas, Nevada".)
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I don't think so. The people specifically are vegan, and their leader believes that future AI overlords will punish people retroactively for their moral failings. This is reported in some of the other posts on this page. It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1] My question is what Sith meant to them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basiliskl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basiliskl
    - codr7 2y ago
      But punishing humans for killing animals isn't a very rational thing to do, is it? Sounds 100% emotional to me, and emotions computers do not have. I guess if we spew enough of this BS onto the internet, AI could work it from there, but calling that rational doesn't make much sense to me.
      - samatman 2y ago
        Communities are people. They are not definitions.
      - int_19h 2y ago
dang 2y ago
(This was originally posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281, but we merged that thread hither)
nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
What is going on: the internet is letting you know all this shit. Imagine you had a ticker feed of every story amongst the 8bn. That would be a crazy story per millisecond.
templeOSdotcom 2y ago
People love to fall into these sort of traps where they convince themselves they are fighting for some sort of cause. The more hopeless the better.

by rdtsc 2y ago

mnky9800n 2y ago

people can and do have mental illness. it doesn't absolve them from knowing right from wrong however.

rdtsc 2y ago
Since it’s a group so wonder if a group mental illness would make sense. I guess it could work for the court “look how out of touch with reality my client is, sith vegans, clearly they didn’t know what they were doing!”
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  I’m sure the court juge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name. Understanding their motivations for the murders, understanding their motivation to call themselves vegan (perhaps it’s a joke for them too, perhaps they’re really vegan) and their motivation to call themselves sith (I would bet for fun joke but it may be branding : and army of determined warriors, or mental illness if their really believe to be sith - yes human brain can to that). It’s very easy to find apparent incoherences in humans behavior by selectively picking out and not searching the motivations. This is the base attack for teenagers bullying book.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    > I’m sure the court judge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name Oh sure, and the jury. One can do both - mock murderers and their ridiculous ideology and study it seriously to, perhaps, prevent others from taking the same path. One doesn't preclude the other, though. To a certain degree I think these group enjoy being taken seriously, being in the news, fawned over, their writings analyzed by people going over their "deep" and "insightful" ideas. So that direction could be playing into their hands to a certain extent. For now, I'll go the "ridicule" path, I think.
    - aziaziazi 2y ago
      Fair points! Both that taking them seriously is probably the direction they aim, and that we shouldn’t forget to have fun and laugh!
- uxp100 2y ago
  It was very cult like with Ziz cutting off members from their friends and the internet. And writing long complicated essays that didn’t make sense if you weren’t in the group.
h0l0cube 2y ago
> it doesn't absolve them from knowing right from wrong however Certain mental conditions absolutely do, in a legal sense. Some conditions onset from brain injury and tumors, some to drug exposure, some are genetic, etc. For those unfortunate few who are afflicted, the most humane outcome is to intervene to keep them away from harming themselves and others, though often they are left unattended to by overstretched mental health services.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  I totally agree with that, meanwhile I think mnky meant that illness doesn’t necessarily remove all your judgement. You can have totally coherent thinking on a field while being incapable to reason on another. Easy exemple : Math and Empathy, where schizophrenic may excel in the former while lacking the later. Someone affected by trisomy 21 have more chances to get the opposite. <- generalization for illustration purpose, those affections are complex and schizophrenia is a spectrum anyway. Even for non-Ill-defined, PTS and other trauma or just learnings- can do that to anyone and age doesn’t help to escape the reasoning-habits. Wise are those that can stay free from mental cages.
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  Paranoid delusions related to obsessive compulsive disorders or personality disorders stemming from post traumatic stress rarely seem to qualify insanity pleas except in episodes of law and order even though they can motivate highly irrational and self destructive behaviour.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  Does it really count if the difference is "be removed from society for a while by being sent to prison" vs "be removed from society indefinitely by being sent to inpatient lockup"?
pjc50 2y ago
We really need a phrase for "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things". It's a very common component in mass shootings.
- incrudible 2y ago
  The things they believe are quite possibly internally consistent and not insane at all, just so far outside the overton window of an ordinary person so as to sound insane. Rather, they are the fringes of the fringes of political ideology and in my view the prime cause of falling prey to these is social alienation.
- MrLeap 2y ago
  > "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things" I have met a lot of people in my life who fit this criteria. Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter. Saying we need a phrase to label people like this in order to _stop mass killings_ sounds crazy to me. If you really had the option to explore the psyche of everyone to the depth necessary to check for "believes insane things" if we could even agree on what that means, I wouldn't be surprised if the test came back positive on 40-70% of the population. A strict enough test and I think we could get that number to 100%. Isn't it a meme at this point how people win the nobel prize in one field, and then say some nutty nonsense about a completely different field? The human species is rational, insane, brilliant, stupid, compassionate and vicious, ugly and beautiful all at once. All of us. More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
  - vkou 2y ago
    > Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter. No, but with a few friends getting together, cheering them along, and feeding into their collective insanity, they could very easily get together and do something serious. Most of the insurrectionists (the people who invaded Congress, not the people who went home after attending the rally) in Jan 6th can be described as such. That network of 'friends' is critical for actually motivating them to get off their ass and act on their beliefs. > More compassion for self and others would be my preference. The problem is that it's much easier to violently destroy, than it is to create, and the damage that a group of angry people who believe an utterly insane thing is disproportionate.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Neonlicht 2y ago

[flagged]

s1artibartfast 2y ago
define insane here. I think modern social acceptability hinges more on the degree to which personal beliefs infringe on others, at least in the west. If someone refuses to personally eat pasta because they believe in the great spaghetti monster, they can knock themselves out for all I care.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  To the extent that your neighbors believe in false or unprovable things that don’t exist in our tangible reality, that should concern you. This can absolutely lead to horrifying violence, and has repeatedly done so in the past. The good thing about most major organized religions is that they’ve developed (some) guardrails against murdering the non-believers based on the theory that some intangible being requires this of them.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    All first principles are unprovable. Theism does not have a monopoly on violence, so I don't see why I should be more concerned about it then anything else.
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      Because you can't reason with someone who doesn't employ reason. That doesn't mean they won't kill you - it just shuts down one avenue by which you might talk them out of it.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        But religious people can be reasonable and atheist can be unreasonable.

tolerance 2y ago

Look up Joshua Citarella’s coverage of the ideological milieus that Generation Z cultivated during COVID on platforms like Discord. And then check out the term “metairony” or “postirony” and this story make more sense…at least as much sense as the absurdity of it all will allow you to make of it.

teachrdan 2y ago
We seem to live in a post-ironic moment. Look no further than the Boogaloo Boys. They want to start a second American civil war and are named after the 1984 movie "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo". It would be a joke except they've engaged in violent attacks up to and including murder in the service of trying to start that aforementioned civil war. Are they serious or a joke? I think their embrace of a ridiculous name makes them almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term. It's comparable to how the Nazi "goose step" march was terrifying precisely because it was so awkward and unnatural. It's like, if these guys are capable of doing this with a straight face, what else are they capable of? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Jokingly referring to something as "<subject_goes_here> 2: Electric Boogaloo" was a very common turn of phrase on certain parts of the internet in the early-mid 2010s. It sounds like a joke because it grew out of a joke.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  >almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term. I think another way to look at it is willful nonconformance and rejection of mainstream values (and judgement). Not unlike gutter punks dressing the way they did. I think counter culture has a long history of this, from men wearing their hair long to people dressing up as literal clowns.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
This post came to mind for me https://moonmetropolis.substack.com/p/antioch-the-first-foodist-mass-shooting https://moonmetropolis.substack.com/p/antioch-the-first-food...

joe_the_user 2y ago

"Vegan Sith"? For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.

zozbot234 2y ago
A far more likely possibility is that their ideology is actually centered around "Sith who happen to originate from Vega (a.k.a. α Lyrae)", not "Sith who abstain from animal products". (A residual possibility is "Sith from Las Vegas, Nevada".)
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I don't think so. The people specifically are vegan, and their leader believes that future AI overlords will punish people retroactively for their moral failings. This is reported in some of the other posts on this page. It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1] My question is what Sith meant to them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basiliskl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basiliskl
  - codr7 2y ago
    But punishing humans for killing animals isn't a very rational thing to do, is it? Sounds 100% emotional to me, and emotions computers do not have. I guess if we spew enough of this BS onto the internet, AI could work it from there, but calling that rational doesn't make much sense to me.
    - samatman 2y ago
      Communities are people. They are not definitions.
    - int_19h 2y ago

dang 2y ago

(This was originally posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281, but we merged that thread hither)

nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago

What is going on: the internet is letting you know all this shit. Imagine you had a ticker feed of every story amongst the 8bn. That would be a crazy story per millisecond.

templeOSdotcom 2y ago

People love to fall into these sort of traps where they convince themselves they are fighting for some sort of cause. The more hopeless the better.